UN Launches First of its Kind ‘Privacy Lab’ to Unlock Benefits of International Data Sharing

The UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics has announced the launch of a pilot programme, to make international data sharing more secure by using Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs).

Announced at Dubai Expo 2020, the ‘UN PET Lab’ is running a pilot program with four National Statistical Offices (NSOs).

These comprise the US Census Bureau, Statistics Netherlands, the Italian National Institute of Statistics and the UK’s Office for National Statistics.

The lab will demonstrate that PETs can make fully compliant data sharing and data insights between organizations possible for the first time, utilizing publicly available trade data from UN Comtrade.

Oblivious Software Limited, an Irish start-up, and privacy-focused open-source community OpenMined have already come on board to enable safe experimentation with PETs and remove the barriers to practical implementation. The Lab expects new users and providers to join in due course.

PETs help data providers and data users to safely share information by using encryption and protocols that allow someone to produce useful output data without “seeing” the input data.

They also typically ensure that data will be protected throughout its lifecycle and that outputs cannot be used to ‘reverse engineer’ the original data.

The PET Lab will see statistical organisations collaborate with technology providers who offer PET technologies.

Dr Jack Fitzsimons, co-founder of Oblivious, said, ?“When you send data to a server, or person for that matter, there is well-established technology to make sure it lands at the right place.

“However, until now you’ve basically had no guarantee about how your data is actually used and if it’s kept within its original scope.

“The work that the PET Lab is undertaking will be incredibly useful for international collaborations, and alleviate red flags for projects which may otherwise be impossible due to concerns over the handling of sensitive data.”

The PET Lab’s first use case will see NSOs share data relating to the import and export of certain commodities recorded between their own country and all of the other countries in the group.

Each pair of countries will then use PETs to discreetly check whether the amount of their bilateral trade corresponds or not. The learning exercise will use pre-approved, publicly available data and will aim to ‘iron out’ any technical, security, or bureaucratic challenges.